How to Control Your Board Discussion and Avoid Chaos

Mark Suster is a two-time entrepreneur who has gone to "the dark side" of venture capital. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a general partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. You can find him on Twitter @msuster.

Even if you follow this game plan meticulously your board meeting can be taken off course by well-intentioned board members who lead you down a rate hole.

Here’s how it happens …

1. Topic Creep

You start out your board meeting and a well-meaning board member who read your deck noticed a detail she didn’t understand on page 18, "Bob, I noticed that your margins in Canada declined from 48 percent to 46 percent while your margin in Mexico is up by 4 percent. Can you please explain the discrepancy?"

I call this "topic creep" and it is killing your board meeting. It might be useful for Sally to know the answer to this but it isn’t the most valuable use of the time you spend together as a board.

Often this is the first thing that comes up at your board meeting because while you’re sitting around waiting for the meeting to begin some random questions are flying. The question is legitimate and might even be important but unless it’s on your core agenda and immediate focus for discussion it might become a big distraction.

In my experience 90 percent of CEOs would just answer this question on the spot. And what seems like a harmless question with a quick answer it leads into a 15-minute discussion.

It also sets the wrong tone for the meeting as you suddenly are starting on your back foot and trying to defend your performance in part of the business rather than leading the meeting. Plus, if you haven’t prepared to talk about Canada vs. Mexico you might come across as unprepared and the board will pick up on this.

How to deal with "topic creep?"

Simple. Say, "great question" and jot down the question and promise to come back to it later in the meeting if you have time and certainly after the meeting if you run out of time.

In fact, I highly recommend having somebody other than the CEO taking down the key questions that are "parked" so that the CEO can stay focused on running the meeting.

Remember, your goal in a board meeting is to maximize the amount of discussion time you have with the smart people you’ve assembled and get their reactions to the key strategic issues you’re debating internally. You’re looking to get their experiences from other companies and to challenge your thinking.

If your goal is to debate A and you spend all of your time on B because somebody else brought it up -- you’ve failed.

2. Does Anybody Have any Questions?

If it isn’t obvious already, this is an invitation to topic creep. It’s like saying, "Please, I don’t have a plan for our limited time today, what do you recommend we speak about?"

You can always leave time on the agenda for later in the meeting for "open questions" or the like so that people feel like they get to express themselves.

Also, if you read my previous post you’ll know that I believe 1:1 calls with each board member before a meeting will help limit the amount of random questions you get and will also help you surface any real concerns somebody may have and that may be worthy of going on the agenda. The strategic topics you discuss at a board meeting should be a healthy combination of what’s on your mind and what you’re trying to solve as well as what big concerns board members may have about your business.

It’s surprising how often I heard people start with "does anybody have any question" and it is seriously a 0 percent hit rate of a successful opening to a meeting in all of the times I’ve seen it.

3. Can I Just Show You One Thing That Doesn’t Work in Your Product?

Of all the things I’m personally most guilty of it’s this one. For companies that have products I can use on a regular basis I often save up a mental queue of all the things I think could be improved in the product. I often ping the teams as I spot issues but as the board meeting approaches invariably I think, "Well, I’ll just mention it next week."

I would put the product feedback into the same bucket as the open questions about the business. It’s best handled by putting it toward the end of the meeting and/or agreeing to answer these questions right after the board meeting.

4. I’d Like to Intro You To …

My greatest pet peeve on boards is when you have "over introducers." These are people who continually feel the need to connect their portfolio companies with people they think would be interesting.

I resist this whenever possible. Of course there are some sensible introductions that are valuable. But it should always be at the company’s discretion unless you’re asking as a favor, in which case, ask as a favor.

Too many VCs I’ve worked with just send out a ton of intro’s because "I think you’d enjoy meeting each other," and no management team is going to easily turn down that email request out of respect for their board member. But it ends up wasting a hell of a lot of time of key executives.

I bring this up because I’ve seen an insane amount of time wasted at board meetings by people spending time talking about all of the introductions they want to make. And often times it’s to other portfolio companies where there’s some self interest.

I can’t say I’m a zero offender in this category either. But I really try hard to be disciplined about not turning board meetings into intro discussions to prove how connected I am.

Summary

Board meetings should be about maximize the amount of time you have with your key directors to debate the issues that are most critical to your business and getting input and buy-in to your key decisions.